Discovery

It was in September last year when the first infinite combo was discovered in Altered with having two Muna Ganesha in play. They would endlessly activate each other and if you had another character in play could infinitely activate that third card. I remember the combo that was found needing about eighteen mana to get it going, which quite frankly was never going to happen.

I stated at the time that this was going to cause a problem in the future but that I wasn’t worried about this particular combo and that there needed to be a limit on these effects. I was told it wouldn’t be an issue.

Escalation

Then the world found the Foundry Armorer combo with a character that gives a boost on another character coming into play. I had an extensive debate with Charles (Game designer) about the issue and was told that it wasn’t an issue (as it involved two unique cards) but that they would deal with it if it was an issue in the future. Charles, it seemed, didn’t want to stop people having their infinite fun.

The Altered Rules

Once the Altered rules finally came into effect, we found that a rule had been added into the rules stating that an effect could only be activated 100 times. I was surprised to see this rule as a) effectively 100 times is little different in the game to an infinite number of times and b) that it was finally an admission that this was likely to be an issue, albeit an indirect admission.

Now I feel that this was a bandage that they had concocted because the game wouldn’t work on BGA if there was an infinite loop that you couldn’t end. It was a poor solution though, because BGA has a timer and clicking around a forced loop 100 times is probably going to run you out of cards.

The February Patch

The strength of a number of infinite loop unique cards was finally recognised by the announcement of the February patch. It was clear by then that certain unique cards were just too strong, and the strength of these cards was due to their potential to go infinite. Gericht even managed to have a unique that had an infinite loop with himself. Equinox therefore finally recognised the problem and announced the suspensions of these cards, and some others that they were watching.

The AMA Question

One person on the recent AMA asked the question of whether there could be a limit on the number of times an ability can be activated (like 3 or 4). Now technically this is already in effect, but the number is so high (100) to be practically not a useful rule. Charles’ answer to this question was interesting. He stated that such a rule would mean that there would be too much tracking that players would need to do.

Personally, I still feel that this is the answer, so I did a check on ALL 252 cards in the two sets currently available. Other than unique cards, you know how many cards would be affected by such a rule? Twelve. Yes, only twelve cards in the game currently. The list is below.

• Akhlut
• Amarok
• Arcolano Milk
• Yeti
• Floral Tent
• Moth Lantern
• Brassbug Hive
• Martengale
• The Ouroboros
• Quetzcoatl
• The Monolith
• Kadirigan Mage Dancer

The Rule of Three

Playing with this rule on BGA would not be an issue of course as you could have a little counter marker next to a card indicating how many times it has been activated in the round. In competitive play at tournaments, it would be the player who is playing the card’s responsibility to track these activations using counters or cubes under the tournament rules. As there are not that many cards that are in need of tracking, I personally feel that this will be less of an issue than Charles thinks. Of course, I don’t know future cards and how many might fall under this category but introducing it now will make players used to tracking as part of the rules.

Apart from the “broken” unique cards, it will also limit the power of the unique cards under the watch list like the Muna anchoring unique cards. This will help Equinox in their goal of making the power of unique cards closer at the top end to the other unique cards by lowering the power of the outliers and prevent new ones causing an issue.